Johnny Firecloud / Bummer! dvd movie.|
Johnny Firecloud / Bummer! buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $14.99 Our Price: $12.99 You Save: $2 Features • Color • DVD-Video • Special Edition • NTSC In Theaters : March, 1973 DVD Release : 12 February, 2002 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Gallery of half-familiar faces |
| You don't hear much about this Something Weird "Angry 70s" double feature. It's a queer duck among the company's releases, the main point of reference being that David F. Friedman produced these films in the early 1970s. They were a response to the new "hardcore" pornography that was making Friedman's "soft" porn obsolete. He spent more money, rounded up some decent actors and put out these Corman-New World-type features. Violence is the order of the day, sex is secondary, some nudity required and there's a seasoning of social comment.
JOHNNY FIRECLOUD is regarded as the "better" of the two films, but both are entertainingly awful, in my opinion. J.F. is an American Indian (played by Latin American actor Victor Mohica). A relative of his (father? grandpa? I don't remember) is driven to drink by the local bigots who rule their Southwestern town; he's mocked and emasculated, and when he attempts to regain his self-respect he's finally murdered. Then a lady schoolteacher on the Reservation who loves J.F. is raped and murdered in her classroom after hours, also by bigots (while a portrait of Abe Lincoln looks down on the scene, unsmiling). J.F.'s love interest is actually a white girl whose father is the town's Lord High Bigot. J.F. can finally stand no more abuse of himself and his people, and he goes ballistic through the second half of the movie. There's a gay cop who doesn't want to serve the bigots who pay his salary but feels he has no choice. Then the second feature is about a terrible "rock group" and the groupies who will do anything to hang out with them. One of these rockers is an impotent sex maniac (the worst kind) who plays bass. He gets his "kicks" seeing dumb, drugged-out groupies being abused and sexually assaulted in the bathroom. The band's lesbian agent (Leslie MacRae from GIRL IN GOLD BOOTS) keeps telling the lead singer to fire the bass player, but he won't do it. The music in this film is slick 70s lounge-rock but these guys think they're Led Zeppelin or something, living like the big rock stars but on a smaller scale and budget. Ultimately things get out of hand and it's a BUMMER. There's a really good audio commentary for JOHNNY FIRECLOUD, in which Friedman talks about the 70s exploitation scene at length. He also tells all you probably want to know about the feature presentation. No commentary for BUMMER, which is a bummer, though I can't imagine what Friedman could say about BUMMER for 90 minutes without having to repeat stuff from the J.F. commentary (e.g. about how he didn't want to make hardcore porn so he started making "general release" movies like this one). The extras are not extensive but there are some wild trailers on this disc. I recommend the disc to fans of drive-in junk, but if you are looking for very good or very sexy films, you might try something else. |
|
|